Monika Streule

What is a city? What is the urban? Fundamental questions of urban research are still many-voiced and controversial. With a focus on urbanization processes, socio-spatial transformations can be described that go far beyond administrative city boundaries. But how can local everyday urban experiences be linked to a global perspective on urbanization?

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Streule, Monika (2019) Wo beginnt und endet Mexiko-Stadt? Stadtethnologie und metropolitane Urbanisierungsprozesse. Bulletin der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften 25, Dossier: Raum – Espace: Zugänge, Praktiken, Kulturen. Bern: SAGW, 36–38. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3538857

In light of his most prominent book Territories in Resistance (Zibechi, 2008), we conducted an interview with the researcher, journalist, and activist Raúl Zibechi. A well-known Uruguayan columnist with various Latin American newspapers, Zibechi was introduced to an English-speaking audience when translations of two of his books were published in 2010 and 2012 (Zibechi, 2010, 2012a). Combining activism and research, he has been working with social movements throughout Latin America since the 1980s. Socioterritorial movements, the key concept around which much of Zibechi’s work revolves, are of particular interest for our theme issue »Contested Urban Territories: Decolonized Perspectives«.

Our interview revisits Zibechi’s idea of the emergence of new or other subjects through socioterritorial practices, and in consequence, of socioterritorial movements as harbingers of possible urban futures. In this context, the interview also explores links to the writings of Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves on »territory«, Henri Lefebvre on »space«, and Frantz Fanon on »zones of being and non-being«. We understand a conversation along these lines as a contribution to the ongoing debate on a decolonialization of knowledge and knowledge production in the field of urban studies.

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Streule, Monika and Anke Schwarz (2019) »Not all spaces are territories«: creating other possible urban worlds in and from Latin America – an interview with Raúl Zibechi. In: Theme issue: Contested urban territories. Decolonized perspectives. Geographica Helvetica, 74, 105–111. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-74-105-2019

In this article, we discuss the concept of territory from a decolonized perspective. We engage with the ongoing debate on decentralizing urban studies to outline the potential drawbacks of essentializing, generalizing or objectifying the urban. Through the socio- territorial approach utilized here we seek to address these issues by shifting attention, first, to the social production of territory, and secondly, from an analysis of state strategies to the urban scale. We understand territory as being produced when subjects struggle over the practices, meanings and tenures of urban space.

An example from Mexico City is employed to illustrate how territory becomes both the site and stake of social struggle. By focusing on the subjects involved in the production of territory, and on the way different subjects produce and reproduce hegemonic spaces and counter-spaces, we emphasize three aspects in particular: first, a territory’s specific material conditions; secondly, the imaginarios (social imaginaries) various actors inscribe into it; and thirdly, the communal land use form of the ejido as a unique territorial regulation. Finally, we argue for the empirical groundedness of the concept of territory with the aim of further pluralizing the field of urban studies. The socio-territorial approach we propose explicitly focuses on power relations in the production of both urban space and knowledge.

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Schwarz, Anke and Monika Streule (2016) A transposition of territory. Decolonized perspectives in current urban research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(5): 1000–1016. DOI 10.1111/1468-2427.12439